Introduzione

The English Midlands has a surprisingly large number of substantial rural rock-cut buildings, ranging from Early Medieval hermitages to 19th century working-class housing. Even in many demonstrably early sites there is often a very close relationship between quarrying and rock-cut buildings. Most commonly this is when structures are set within artificial cliff faces, created by earlier extraction, but sometimes, the relationship is more complicated, and things are not what they seem. This paper looks at two sites at Kinver Edge, Staffordshire. Both are case studies from the Rock-Cut Buildings Project; this project is the first attempt to look at British domestic rock-cut structures as a group, to develop methodologies to record and understand them and their landscapes. The paper explores the relationship of these sites, to a wider extractive landscape of quarries, causeways, terraces and boundaries. It looks at evidence of eremitic landscapes evolving into and forming the setting of extractive, industrial and touristic places. The dataset presented along with the paper is a point-cloud model of one of the key sites, it is hoped that this data will be usable by other scholars working on rock-cut buildings. The author is director of the Rock-Cut Buildings Project at the Cultural Heritage Institute, Royal Agricultural University, U.K.